Chapter 16
Building the New World
It may be that many Britons had their initial taste of a market economy in the settlements (vici) that grew up at the gates of the forts in southern Britain in the first few decades of the Roman occupation. There was a demand for consumables from the Roman garrisons and the inhabitants in the vici were there to supply them. The Roman ways of doing business, the coinage and Mediterranean tastes were all part of the British learning curve.
This initiation into the Roman economy was the prelude to the foundation of Romano-British towns where regional markets were established. It seems that London was founded very early and possibly by the new rulers. An excavation at the Monument, some fifty yards north of the present Thames, has discovered a portion of the first waterfront that was built in AD52 using massive timbers some 1.5m in section. Military equipment found in association with the structure and stamps referring to the Emperor Augustus on the woodwork suggest construction by the Roman authorities.
The Mediterranean Roman Empire could be described as a federation of cities but in Britain cities did not exist so the Romans encouraged the Britons to create them and these were the native-built towns which became the centres that were needed both as markets and administrative capitals of the ‘polis’ (civitates) that were based mainly on the already existing tribal territories. We know a certain amount about them for, since the early nineteenth-century, antiquarians have dug randomly in most of the available sites, causing a lot of damage but providing some information. John Wacher has written the standard work on Romano-British towns that brings together all this miscellaneous knowledge.
A model of a Roman town was already established by the army for its veterans at the colonia of Colchester and it may be that it was used as a prototype. Certainly the Romano-British towns shared particular characteristics with their southern equivalents: the rectilinier layout, forum and basilica complex, bath-house, water supply, amphitheatre and extra-mural cemetery.
But they are not all identical. They varied in size from large towns like Colchester with over a hundred hectares down to a dwarf like Caerwent with seventeen. Most had mansios (official jhostels), walls and impressive gates or gate but they were built with local materials so there would have been no uniformity of appearance. Houses would have ranged widely in size and costliness. Most expensive would have been the houses of the tribal aristocracy who learnt to display their wealth in impressive buildings, some in the Mediterranean style. Less elaborate were the houses of the smaller merchants, the workshops of the tradesmen and the hovels of the workmen and the slaves.
Buildings were timber-framed, a building technique that was traditional in Britain but, in the towns at least, the structures became rectangular, a change which does not seem to have occasioned much surprise amongst archaeologists even though it was the ending of a broad tradition of round house construction that had lasted some fifteen hundred years and this must mean that even the interior designs of the houses were influenced by the Roman architects who were responsible for the layout of the towns and the construction of its masonry structures like walls, gates, forums and basilicas.
In this way the British aristocracy who paid for these towns and became members of the curias responsible for governing the civitates were given a concept of what a Roman city should be like even though perhaps in Britain it was not realised too precisely. Presumably they had visited Colchester, the provincial capital and the centre to which they were responsible for the administration of their civitates. And there must have been architects and surveyors seconded from the military or their civilian counterparts from Gaul looking for work who could be commissioned to give a classical veneer to the new work. Certainly there was no way in which the British could have laid out and constructed the towns on their own without help and it was probably due to the prompting of these experts that the British surrounded themselves with structures built in a vaguely classical fashion. However, there is some previous evidence for rectangular buildings in the Atrebaten stronghold at Silchester in Hampshire and elsewhere at a slightly earlier period, perhaps the result of cross-channel influences in the immediate pre-Roman period.
After the Conquest the Atrebaten aristocracy, like the nobles in the other tribes had the task of administering their tribal territory and redesigning their town after the Roman fashion. It is possible that they received some special help from the Roman government for the name of the Emperor Nero has been found stamped on several bricks there. It is the most completely excavated of Roman provincial capitals and this has made it possible to draw a reasonably complete plan of it. Reports of the excavations that took place between 1890 and 1909 by the Society of Antiquaries appeared in Archaeologia for those years.
Its buildings were put up in timber, built haphazardly at first then along street lines in blocks (insulae. Sing. Insula) of regular size (either 275 Roman feet by 400 Roman feet or 400RF x 400RF). To the first phase belong the Public Baths, four temples and in the central insula the forum and basilica lying immediately south of the main road in the town, the east-west through road from London to Cirencester and Bath. A junction with the road running north-south forms the N.W. corner of the central insula. Four gates of the town were later built at the points where these roads pass through the later walls.
Forum and basilica alone covered nearly 0.8 hectares. On three sides of the forum (the market place) there was a portico with carved Bath stone columns some 4.5m tall. A similar portico surrounded the whole block on the outside and the forum was entered through a monumental arch supported by columns. On one side of the entrance was a small room that may have contained a wooden staircase leading to an upper floor. Eight rooms each about 6.7m square occupied the rest of the eastern range and may have been shops. Similar apartments were found along the north side with a small subsidiary entrance leading into them. One room was subdivided and next door to it was a room reduced in size by a semi-circular wall in front of which may have stood a statue. On the southern side the rooms are larger and two of them had apsidal (semicircular) ends. It has been suggested that these functioned as offices.
The forum was built of coursed local flint with red-tile bonding courses and the 13.5m high buildings were roofed with ceramic tiles or slates of Pennant or Old Red Sandstone. Its fourth side was occupied by the basilica (administrative building) that measured some 70m by 17m with an apse at each end with raised floors. On its western side was a range of rooms including the curia or council chamber of the town council. Two doorways led into the basilica from the forum. Inside, the building was supported on two rows of Bath stone columns, over eight metres tall with capitals in the Corinthian style. This earliest building had a red tesserae floor with mosaics in the apses. Walls were painted and there were areas of white marble wall veneer in the curia. Green glass was used in the clerestory windows. Inside, the building was embellished with statues. After a fire at the end of the third century, the basilica was rebuilt on a simplified plan but with the same dimensions.
Compared with what was built before in Britain, this must have seemed unimaginatively grand to the people of the civitas. Even to our eyes it would be an impressive demonstration of civic pride and prosperity. But the basilica at Silchester was not alone in this. We can compare it with the basilica at Caerwent, a much smaller community, and find the same sort of monumentality. Caerwent was excavated on several occasions during the nineteenth and twentienth centuries and reported upon in the journal ‘Archaeologia’.
Like Silchester’s basilica the one at Caerwent was placed in the centre of the town at a point where the two main streets intersected and it occupied a complete insula. An external portico graced the south side with the monumental entrance and inside an internal portico ran around three sides with the basilica. The colonnade was supported on dwarf columns standing on a low wall and these fronted shops on the southern and eastern side. One of these shops has been identified as a fish shop. Beneath the western colonnade were government offices but later on a temple was built in the middle of this range projecting into the market place.
Mounting a flight of steps, one entered a doorway on the southern side of the basilica, smaller than that at Silchester, with rectangular rooms instead of apses at each end and passed through wooden screens supported on dwarf walls. One of the rooms was heated and contained the tribunal (rostrum). Like Cirencester, columns supporting the interior of the basilica were crowned with Corinthian capitals while the walls were painted with bright colours and with concrete floors. Behind the basilica the range of rooms probably included the curia, the registry and the treasury that had a mosaic floor and walls with painted columns and panels above an imitation marble dado. Similar basilicas and fora have been excavated at Verulamium and Wroxeter.
Another ubiquitous building was the Baths complex. Some towns had more than one set of baths and, of course, baths were introduced into Britain by the military who built the excavated set at Caerleon fortress which remains the only military suite in Britain inside the defences. Others were built outside fort walls and seemed to have been considered a place of relaxation rather than a necessary sanitary provision.
Silchester has a good excavated example of a public bath house, erected early on in the history of the town, perhaps as early as the reign of Nero. Columns of Bath stone supported the portico through which the customer entered the palaestra or sports ground. From there the bather could go into the apodyterium or changing-room and then into the baths proper, through the cool room, the frigidarium, with a water tank for those who wanted a cold plunge after their bath, the tepidarium, a slightly-warm room, and finally into the caldarium or hot room with a hot-water bath.
For bathers who wanted a hotter experience, there was the sudatorium (sauna) leading off the caldarium. Having sweated sufficiently, the bather could scrape off the oil that he had anointed himself at the beginning of the operation together with the dirt with a hook-shaped implement called a strigil. Glass containers for oils and perfumes, nail-cleaners, ear picks and tweezers have been found in the excavation. As the years went on, the baths at Silchester were steadily enlarged with the addition at different times of latrines and a second caldarium.
At Caerwent, the baths also had a long history, starting in the late-first or early second century, and this is probably the situation at most of the civitas capitals. In the small town of Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, the baths were built immediately behind the mansio and perhaps were shared by both the travellers and the townsfolk.
Of course, the baths used a good deal of water as well as fuel. Water supply and drainage was always taken seriously in Roman towns and the Romans seemed to have passed these concerns on to the Britons. Rivers and springs were used in the Romano-British towns but the majority of such settlements depended on wells. Examples are found in every investigation and a good many interesting artifacts are found preserved in the anerobic conditions at their bottoms.
Wells were common at Silchester for a good supply of water could be obtained by digging through the gravel subsoil to the underlying beds of sand and clay. Depending on the location of a well within the town, it could vary in depth from 2.5m to over 8 metres. The circular shafts were usually up to a metre wide and encased in flint near the top and framed in timber further down and rested on timber collars as foundations. Sometimes, old wooden barrels were used as linings.
In some cases, water supplies from wells were inadequate and water had to be brought in by aqueducts. At Lincoln, earthenware pipes were laid underground for at least a mile outside the town. They were sheathed in very hard pink concrete on top of a foundation of limestone slabs. Sand-filled holes beneath this were intended as sites for sighting-posts for setting out the line of the aqueduct and for determining the gradient. The course of the pipeline was traced to a stream that had been dammed to produce a reservoir. From there the pipe was carried across rough ground on stone piers rising some 2.5m high, then on a solid banks and then underground. The remains of a double-action force pump suggest that it was used to lift the water from the pool into the pipe-line. There must have been cisterns in Lincoln to store the water before it was distributed to the consumers and, in fact, a third-century example has been found built of large limestone blocks waterproofed with opus signinum (a fine cement) and surrounded by a pavement of orange-coloured Lias slabs that was probably part of a public fountain. Water brought in by aqueduct into Lincoln has been estimated at some 5,000 gallons per hour, not a great deal, but presumably the supply was amplified by water from wells in the town.
Another way of bringing water into a town was by an open conduit or canal. The best investigated example is that which leads from a source in neighbouring high ground down into the Romano-British town at Dorchester. It is at least 18.2 kilometres long. In the town it ran in a channel some 1.2m wide lined with masonry walls with a tiled floor and was probably covered in. It dates from the end of the first century AD and lasted for about a century. As Dorchester could just as easily have been supplied by wells, the aqueduct was really superfluous and was probably allowed to fall into disuse when the costs of keeping it in repair became too expensive. Other sites with aqueducts seem to have been Leicester, Wall and Wroxeter.
Sewers have been discovered at Lincoln, York, Wroxeter and London. Investigations of a large one at Lincoln from the bath house latrine demonstrate that it led into a considerable drainage system underlying the main streets. At Wroxeter it ran down to the river. Wooden pipes were used to conduct drinking-water around towns. They were usually joined end-to-end with wooden or iron collars. London has examples, wooden pipes linked to roadside drains. Lead pipes were often used as well since the danger from the material was not appreciated at the time. Examples of these come from Caerwent and Chester. Colchester has a fine vaulted tiled channel probably used as a storm drain.
Another building common in towns was mentioned above, the mansio or posting station where messengers of the imperial post changed horses and could spend the night. The Antonine Itinerary, a third-century road-book gives details of the locations of these throughout the Empire and in Britain, where, along the road from Chichester to London, they seem to have been placed in settlements at intervals of some twenty kilometres. Probably the best excavated example in Britain is at Silchester but an example at Caerwent had over forty rooms and stood near the south gate.
The appearances of Romano-British buildings varied a good deal depending on the part of the country and the status of the owners. Only the grandest buildings were built in masonry, most stood on dwarf rubble walls and were framed in timber, the wall materials being whatever was commonest in the area. They could be whitewashed or faced with concrete and irregular pieces of stone known as opus incertum, or opus reticulatum, similar, but forming a visible network of polygonal stones or latericium, built of brick.
During the second half of the second century a large number of towns were provided with defences. Initially, they were constructed in earth dug out of a surrounding ditch and the banks so formed were probably surmounted with a sentry-path and a wooden palisade. In contrast with these ramparts, gateways would be in stone and often monumental in scale. At Cirencester, for example, the eastern gate was slung between two ‘D’-shaped towers and had passages for pedestrians and two carriageways. Stone-built gates have also been found at Verulamium and were constructed at Silchester, Lincoln and Colchester amongst other places.
During the third century most of the earthen ramparts were reinforced with a stone wall built along their frontages. The most imposing were the walls and gates at the colonia of Colchester where they have a circumference of 3.2 kilometres and were built of septaria stone with red-tile bonding courses. Over 2.5m thick, thicker at foundation level, they stood some 4.5m tall at their highest points. At least six gates and two postern entrances have been identified as well as small internal towers that may have contained steps that led up to the ramparts. The Balkerne or West Gate was the most imposing with two footways and carriageways flanked by towers with a first-floor gate-house over the gate. Walls have been investigated at York, Brough-on-Humber, Lincoln, Cirencester and Exeter. At Caerwent and Yorkfc extensive stretches still stand and gates of this period are at Verulamium, Silchester, London and Chester.
During the fourth century, artillery bastions were added to many stone walls, turning the towns into medieval-style ‘castles’. New wider ditches were dug outside. Places with these modification were London, Aldborough, Brough-on-Humber, Cirencester, Kenchester and Chichester. At Caerwent the bastions were hollow and probably had timber flooring at the level of the rampart-walk. Ballistae (small-calibre artillery) were mounted on them. Apparently, timber roofs had to be provided to keep the ballista cords dry. It is not clear yet why these particulat towns had their defences augmented in this way or even why, earlier, towns had stone walls added to their ramparts. On the Continent, in times of unrest, country folk abandoned their homesteads to take refuge in towns. If this happened in the British provinces, perhaps this could be a reason but so far we have no archaeological evidence in towns of the sort of temporary shacks that would have been thrown up in these circumstances.
At Silchester the amphitheatre was built outside the wall as most were. At first it was built in timber at a very early date between AD50-AD70, presumably by the military for their own use. During the third century it was refurbished and the timber revetment replaced by a wall of flint and brown ironstone. Banks of timber seats could accommodate between 4500 and 9000 spectators watching various blood-sports with animals and public executions. This capacity of the amphitheatre is rather surprising since the population of the town could not have been more than 1200. Probably the shows attracted people from a wide area around the civitas capital.
At Dorchester the amphitheatre is bigger with an arena measuring 70m by 56m and like the early phase at Silchester was timber-built. A similar sequence can be seen at Cirencester. At Caerwent the amphitheatre was placed inside the walls which is rather unusual. Two small amphitheatres can be found at Charterhouse-on-Mendip in Somerset and at Woodcuts in Dorset. So far the only amphitheatre extensively explored is the military example outside the Second Legion fortress at Caerleon.
Some of the earliest remains of shops built during the reign of Claudius have been discovered at Verulamium. Each consisted of a room about 5m by 6m with a slightly smaller room behind. They are arranged in blocks of four and in front of them was a colonnade with wooden columns supporting a sloping roof that provided the passers-by with a covered walk. All were destroyed by Boudicca in AD60. Later, they were replaced on a similar plan but with more rooms behind the shops. Walls were based on sleeper-beams laid horizontally in trenches with alleys left between each shop. In front of them were postholes that are thought to have been the foundations of exterior counters. One shop may have been a bakery and another, littered with many broken wine-jars, must have been a wine-shop.
Houses in Verulamium were also usually built in timber. One example was oblong in plan with the gable end on the street line. Along one long side an open-fronted verandah may have looked out on to a gravelled yard. Most of the rooms had floors of opus signinum. Later, this house was replaced with one on an L-shaped plan. Clearly standards were rising for one of the rooms had a mosaic floor and painted walls.
Unfortunately, this house was burnt down and its site became part of a gravelled yard belonging to an even grander house. Like most buildings of the later period, it was constructed with foundations of flint-and-mortar. Although a grand building, it was originally intended to be much bigger. Even so, it was larger than most buildings in Verulamium with two entrances, each with a porter’s lodge and may well have been two-storied with an internal staircase. Three rooms had underfloor heating and an underground shrine approached by a corridor at the bottom of a ramp. This is an unusual feature in a town house in Britain as far as we are aware. Rooms along the street line appear to have been rented out as shops with both a large and small latrine included in this range. Water for the establishments was supplied by lead pipes. (Wacher). A similar streetscape of wooden buildings has been discovered in Moorgate in London with planked floors and a remarkably well preserved door with iron hinges. Inside the houses was a bear's skull. perhaps from the nearby amphitheatre, as well as several ovens and kilns, large amounts of leather and animal bone, presumably for some industrial purpose. From the bottom of a well came metal buckets, large dishes, handled shallow bowls, a set of three nested bowls, all in a copper alloy, and an iron ladle and a trivet (a tripod for holding cooking-vessels over heat). Most were in good condition. (Pre-Construct Archaeology)
Many of these town buildings were not houses in our modern, suburban sense, that is, entirely devoted to housing a family. In Romano-British houses, like Roman houses, a business of some sort was carried on - manufacture, usually combined with a shop, or some service activity or, in the case of the aristocracy, meetings concerned with local government. So, one must be careful when labelling a building in a Romano-British town simply as a ‘house’ or a ‘shop’.
It is quite clear that Romano-British towns were manufacturing centres. Winchester, for example, is mentioned in an official Roman document as one of the towns in the Empire responsible for producing cloth on an industrial scale for the army. Leather was used for a variety of purposes that included underwear as well as footwear. Examples of shoes are common and are occasionally stamped with the maker’s name.
Archaeological evidence demonstrates that mosaics were being made in Cirencester in a workshop where scraps of the raw materials were found. They included coloured stones like sandstones, brick, coloured glass and pieces of samian pottery. Apparently the mosaic panels were made up to order in the workshop, carried to the site of the floor, laid down and then surrounded with their decorative borders.
In London an hour-glass shaped stone, imported from the Rhineland, was the topstone of a large mill presumably turned by animal power and producing flour for sale to the townsfolk. At Springhead in Kent a building has been identified as a bakery facing onto the street. Apart from the shop, two other rooms were also work rooms for they each had an oven. Such bakeries probably existed in all Romano-British towns but so far no samples of carbonised bread, cakes and pies have yet come to light as they have done in Pompeii and other continental Roman towns.
Eighty whetstones were excavated in the remains of a shop at Wroxeter, indicating the widespread use of edged metal tools. A tombstone from York shows a smith from the town and hoards of metal have been found in Silchester, Great Chesterford and Caerwent. At Great Chesterford a hammer, an anvil and pincers were part of a smith’s tool-kit together with chains, hooks, handcuffs and a large door-lock. Wroxeter has produced evidence of a bronzesmith’s shop with a small furnace and little objects like hairpins scattered around. It is likely that pewter was made in or close to Bath using lead from the Mendip mines and a hoard of pewter flagons has turned up in the spa. Gold was being worked in small quantities in some towns, presumably used for gilding or the manufacture of small trinkets.
Carpenters’ tools are regularly uncovered in excavations in Romano-British towns. These include saws from Great Chesterford and Silchester together with chisels and hammers with planes coming from Silchester, Caerwent and Verulamium. Barrel staves are commonly found as barrels were used for transporting a number of commodities apart from wine or ale. In Britain, the continental amphorae used for these purposes are rarely seen. Exidence of barrel manufacture comes from London and Silchester.
Pottery shops probably existed in most towns. At Wroxeter, a heap of mortaria (mixing-bowls) indicated a pottery stall and, in Colchester, a shop seems to have supplied glass as well as samian and other wares. Pottery was not often made inside towns but there is evidence for the manufacture of samian ware at Colchester where common forms were being produced by a dozen or so craftsmen. Their wasters have been found together with fragments of the moulds used for decorated bowls. As they were in business from the late-first century to the end of the second century it suggests a steady and long-lasting demand in the area for the shiny-red pots.
Small towns grew up around local industries - Verlucio in Wiltshire and Weston-under-Penyard and Brampton were concerned with the iron industry, Camerton and Nettleton in Somerset with pewter, Charterhouse with the Mendip lead-mining and Droitwich produced and processed salt. Sea Mills in Somerset was a small port trading along the Bristol Channel, while Bath, Springhead and Buxton were spas.
A great deal about the common way of life in Roman Britain can be learnt from a study of a small town and they provide a good basis for a piece of personal research because they developed, not for administrative reasons, but as the result of local economic opportunities and social trends in the Romano-British life-style.
Glass-making may well have been carried on in most major towns for glass is fragile and could not be carried far. Furnaces are known at Mancetter and Wroxeter but the best evidence comes from Caistor-by-Norwich where a workshop has been excavated. The furnaces were situated in a partially-enclosed yard. We know that the main glass products were bottles, flasks, cups and bowls and these are more likely to find more buyers in towns than amongst the peasants in the countryside.
An example of a service industry is shown by the discovery of oculists’ stamps. Examples come from Chester and Kenchester. They were used for stamping the oculist’s name and instructions for use were put on cakes of the remedy that was either rubbed on directly or dissolved in vinegar or wine and dabbed on the eye. It seems that eye troubles were very common in Roman Britain.
Evidence of trading in towns can sometimes be provided by balances or steelyards. A balance closely resembled a modern pair of scales with two scale-pans and was known as a libra while the steelyard or statera worked on the lever principle with a graduated arm or beam suspended from a hook placed at one end. Several hooks or scale-pans to contain the objects being weighed could be suspended from the beam at the same end and the weight would be moved along the beam until it balanced them. The scale-beam was marked on its several faces to correspond to the use of different suspension hooks. For corn a measure of volume was used in the shape of a bucket and called a modius. Folding bronze rules were used for measuring length and there is one in the London Museum along with a steelyard. A wooden one excavated in London was a carpenter's rule marked in Roman inches.
Evidence for trade from other parts of the Roman Empire can appear in the form of inscriptions on altars set up as thank-offerings by merchants and sometimes on tombstones. M. Aurelius Lunaria of Bordeaux traded in York: on a tombstone from Bordeaux we hear of another who traded with Britain: M. Secundus Silvanus traded in pottery across the North Sea with Britain and set up an altar in Domburg. And occasionally we have more dramatic evidence like the wreck of a ship on Pudding Pan Rock off Whitstable that was carrying a cargo of samian pottery to Britain.
Of course a good deal of industry and manufacturing was rurally based and products like grain and hides and minerals, fuel and timber only arrived in town markets after processing. Most work was done by human or animal muscle; there does not seem to have been a shortage of labour in the province that would necessitate the use of a great deal of machinery.
When machinery was required the principal source of power was water. We have some knowledge of watermills on Hadrian’s Wall. At Haltwhistle Burn large millstones and part of a wooden watermill have been found. Close by Chesters fort where the wall crossed the Tyne on a bridge, a channel or mill-race was set into the northern side. At Chollerford where the wall crossed the River Irthing a paved mill-race was discovered together with a stone spindle used as a bearing. These were all presumably mills belonging to the army and date from the third century AD. Further south an iron spindle was discovered in excavations at Great Chesterford and there were possibly two sawmills at Lincoln on the River Witham. There were probably others elsewhere but it is likely that, as the technology was Roman, the enterprises were the inspiration of foreign entrepreneurs or the army. An example of a complete Roman mill system was investigated at the Janiculum Mills in Rome in 1989.
Pottery, along with woollen cloth manufacture was probably Britain’s most important industry. It was organised on a more commercial basis than in the Iron Age with the potter’s wheel as the basic tool of the trade. Most of the pottery forms were either traditionally British or copies of the samian forms. Manufacturing locations depended on the supply of clay, fuel and water, all of which are required in large quantities. For a database of Romano-British pottery see www.potsherd.uklinux.net/database.
Once such a location has been identified and the pottery proved to be popular it attracted other potters to the location and in some cases a very large industry developed by the second century. A good example of this is in the Nene Valley in Northamptonshire. Some of the biggest pottery kilns recorded were found in 1828 (sic) that is said to have had a capacity of between five and six hundred pots at one time. Smaller kilns in the same area could hold two to three hundred. Not all firings were successful and large numbers of ‘wasters’ (spoiled pots) are found in excavation on these sites.
In two cases at least, small towns grew up around the industry. One was at Water Newton, a small town alongside the River Nene, and this situation perhaps explains the country-wide distribution of the Nene Valley pottery products. The other site is Wall in Staffordshire on the Fosse Way with a posting station and a mansio and large bath-house. Its factory produced mortaria and flagons.
Nene Valley ware (at one time called Castor Ware) included grey and buff wares for local markets and mortaria (food processing bowls) for wider distribution. The commonest pottery, however, consists of beakers of various sizes made in a light-coloured body covered with a slip that varies in colour from red, through brown to black. This slipped ware is sometimes referred to as ‘colour-coated ware’. Rouletting, done with a toothed wheel, was one form of decoration and another was barbotine decoration, done through a nozzle, like a cake-icing nozzle. Simple scale patterns, leaf and scroll patterns, scenes with figures like mythological events, hunts and gladiatorial combats are also found. Some beakers are decorated with white slip with leaves, berries and figures. Boxes and lids are rouletted, flagons, plates and bowls decorated with circles or leaf designs in red paint on buff slip.
New Forest pottery was probably made by large numbers of small potters working in the forest during the third and fourth centuries and distributed in southern Britain but not so widely as the Nene Valley ware. Its characteristic form is a hard, metallic purple-slipped surface on indented beakers but the jugs and flasks are decorated with stamped rosettes and white slip used as a paint. Other colours are grey or white bodies. Another ‘forest’ pottery area was that of Savernake in north Wiltshire.
From about AD120, Black-burnished Ware made in Dorset began to be distributed in the forms of cooking-pots, dishes and bowls made in a dense black, granular body which is usually burnished. Cooking-pots are decorated with latticing, with wavy or looped lines and with arcs. There were many imitations produced in various parts of the province but the best-quality ware was supplied to the army in the north and is common on Hadrian’s Wall. An important production centre was at Poole in Dorset and one can suggest that the port there was used to transport consignments to the north.
Another burnished ware is Severn Valley Ware (Glevum ware). Kilns are known at Malvern, Birmingham and Shepton Mallet in Somerset producing bowls, jars and tankards in a colour-range from creamy-buff to orange-red. It is common all over the Severn valley and other parts of the West Country. (Collingwood and Richmond)
The iron industry was widespread because of the wide distribution of native iron. So far, the largest site known is at Brayford on Exmoor, in operation during the second and third centuries AD. The excavators suggest that the volume of production was so high so it could supply overseas markets. Ores or ironstones, after preliminary roasting, were smelted with charcoal in either a bowl or a shaft furnace. Bowl furnaces had been used during the Iron Age, producing between one and two kilograms of iron, and were not as efficient as the shaft furnace.
Shaft furnaces could have been up to 1.5m tall and some 0.30m in diameter and were built in clay. They were loaded from the top with alternate layers of iron ore and charcoal. Molten slag was drawn off through an arched opening at the bottom and ran away in channels in which it solidified. Another arched opening allowed air to be drawn into the shaft but bellows could also be used. Shaft furnaces achieved a higher temperature, so increasing the carbon content of the iron and also producing larger amounts of iron. Characteristic finds from shaft-furnace sites are pieces of slag that had solidified in the channels and so have a rounded bottom and a contorted upper surface.
So far the only known goldmine in Britain is at Dolaucothi in South Wales which still can be entered today. Above the entrance up the hill a reservoir was placed so that water could be ‘hushed’ down the slope to expose new working surfaces and also be channelled to work a crushing mill or pass through panning cradles. Gold was melted into ingots and would have been used by the numerous goldsmiths in towns for manufacture into trinkets like brooches and hair adornments.
Lead-silver mines appear to have been open-cast and the extraction process was like quarrying. After the ore was crushed, it was roasted and then smelted to give an alloy of lead with a small percentage of silver. A cupellation furnace was employed in which the metal was re-melted in a bowl-shaped container lined with a thick layer of crushed bone ash. A blast of air was directed at the surface of the molten metal so as to oxidise the lead that was absorbed by the bone ash, leaving behind a small pellet of silver. (Liversidge)
Lead was retrieved by re-smelting the bone ash mixture with more charcoal. It was used by plumbers for water-pipes, coffins, bath-linings and roofing. Alloyed with tin, it made pewter. Although pewter was produced in the west, most pewter artifacts are found in East Anglia. Stamped lead ‘pigs’ or ingots have been found in Somerset and in Derbyshire. Some workings on Mendip south of Bath are the best-known. Copper ores could be mined in Shropshire, Wales and on Anglesey. Alloyed with tin, copper produced bronze that was very widely used in Roman Britain for ornaments, pins, brooches, harness and fittings. Tin was mined on Dartmoor and in Cornwall.
Salt was produced by evaporation of sea-water or of brine from mineral springs and so would usually have to be carried considerable distances to customers. It was light enough for this to happen and was probably transported in the panniers of pack-horses.
Outcrops of coal were exploited in many parts of the country and, like the salt, sometimes the product was carried considerable distances. Recent work on farm-sites in the Fenland suggests that the barges that carried grain or Nene Valley pottery up the canals, the rivers or along the coast in eastern England came back with coal for the ovens that were used for drying grain or evaporating salt. Coal was mined by the army in the north and carted to some of the forts on the Antonine Wall or Hadrian’s Wall where it was used in the baths and in the ironworks. There is a documentary reference to ‘stony masses’ burning on the altars in the temple of Minerva in Bath that were probably mined in the Somersetshire coalfield near Radstock. Villas in the west used coal from this coalfield and from the coalfield in the Forest of Dean. Coal was used for smelting lead in North Wales and for heating the baths in Wroxeter.
Simple jewellery was made from Kimmeridge shale and jet. The shale from the Dorset coast was worked during the Iron Age and was used in both periods for making armlets. During the Roman period furniture legs were made out of the material. As even the best Romano-British living-rooms were sparsely furnished, such a piece would have been an impressive talking-point. Jet, however, is shinier and altogether more attractive. It was collected off the beaches at Whitby in Yorkshire and workshops for its processing must have existed in the area. Hairpins, finger-rings, bangles, bead necklaces, bracelets and pendants were produced.
Some settlements had a range of industrial occupations. Wilderspool in Cheshire had at different times a pottery between AD90 and 160, furnaces for iron smelting and smithing, traces of lead-working, and has produced crucibles for making bronze and glass. At Tiddington in Warwickshire was another such active industrial centre, engaged in tile-making, iron smithing and lead working.
An important extractive industry was the quarrying of stone that was widely employed for building and statuary as well as road-building. In Kent, the limestone from the Lower Greensand known, as Kentish Ragstone, was used. In Sussex, Pulborough sandstone and limestone were quarried. Green sandstone was employed for several buildings along the coast while the Cornish site of Camborne was built of local slate and granite. The limestones of the Jurassic ridge were employed in Somerset and Dorset, in north Wiltshire, and in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Stones for roofing and floors travelled greater distance. Pennant stone was distributed by the Avon from Bristol up into Wiltshire and Gloucestershire and was even found at a villa at Ely and there are other examples of similar long-distance carriage that in most cases was by water. (Rosenfeld)
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